Racial McCarthyism

WASHINGTON - JANUARY 20: In this handout phot...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Jeff Jacoby:

RACIAL MCCARTHYISM is alive and well in Barack Obama’s America, where reckless liberals hurl baseless charges of racism at critics of the nation’s first black president. Remember ex-president Jimmy Carter attributing “an overwhelming portion’’ of the fervent opposition to Obama’s health care bill to “the fact that he is a black man’’? Or actress/activist Janeane Garofalo smearing the Tea Party phenomenon as being “about hating a black man in the White House. . . racism straight up’’? Or for that matter Obama himself, predicting that Republicans would demonize him because “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills’’?

Last week, it was David Gregory’s turn to play the race card. The host of NBC’s “Meet the Press’’ accused Newt Gingrich of having used “coded, racially tinged language’’ when he described Obama as a “food-stamp president’’ a few days earlier.

In reality Gingrich hadn’t made anything like a racially tinged remark, coded or otherwise. He had simply given his stump speech to a Republican audience in Georgia, during which he criticized Obama’s limp economic record in these words:

“Do you want to be a country that creates food stamps — in which case, frankly, Obama is an enormous success, the most successful food-stamp president in American history? Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?’’

...
Gingrich got a bum rap on this one. There is a tendency of Democrats to try to avoid arguments on the issue by characterizing their opponents as racist. This is one of those occasions.
Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more

Apple's huge investment in US including Texas facility

Blaze: Apple announced a $500 billion commitment to infrastructure in the United States over four years, its largest commitment to domestic spending to date. Apple said it will expand teams and facilities in Arizona, California, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Washington as part of its new spending. With a new facility in Houston, Texas, Apple will reportedly double its investment in advanced manufacturing along with increasing investments in AI and silicon engineering. The company said in a press release that the Houston facility will produce servers to support Apple Intelligence, the "personal intelligence system that helps users write, express themselves, and get things done." ... The Texas facility will be for advanced technologies.   Texas has become a place that is very supportive of the tech industries.  Austin and Houston have seen much of the tech growth in the state.  Texas universities have been active in the AI field.
Read more